


Psycho Poems

by Hobbit4Lyfe



Category: Bates Motel (2013), Psycho (1960)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-05-01 05:47:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5194463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hobbit4Lyfe/pseuds/Hobbit4Lyfe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These poems are about my memories of watching the Psycho movies and the remake of the first movie. Moved from FanFiction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Psycho (1960)

It was 10th grade year,  
October,  
Sitting in my TV productions class,  
Mr. Chacey’s class, when  
I saw it.  
Lauren, one of my best friends,  
Since first grade,  
Sat to my right.  
What we were supposed to learn  
From Psycho, I still don’t know.  
How the principal  
Approved Psycho,  
Or if the principal  
Approved Psycho, I still don’t know.  
And yet, the crazy old man still shows the movie.  
At first, Chacey couldn’t find the old VHS tape,  
First checking our classroom,  
Then his office,  
Finally, he found it in his other room.  
Nobody really wanted to watch,  
Not at first.  
Especially not me, I’ll admit.  
I didn’t really pay much attention at first,  
Coloring a composition book,  
Until Marion came to the Motel.  
Norman caught my attention.  
The shower was so familiar,  
Not just parodies,  
But I realized I’d seen it before,  
Sort of:  
“Hey! So that’s where they got the shower part in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!”  
And we all noticed something,  
But Nick said it:  
“Yeah, right! That wasn’t a chick stabbing Marion!”  
My classmates and I  
Enjoyed  
Yelling at the TV,  
Even though they couldn’t hear us  
Through the glass screen.  
Mostly, we yelled at the screen  
During the cellar scene:  
To Lila, “No, stupid woman! Don’t go in the basement!  
That’s where all the bad stuff happens in horror movies!”  
About Mother, I thought, “OMG! SpongeBob! Nancy Drew! Wait… AAAHHH!”  
Thinking of “Chocolate with Nuts” and Secret of the Scarlet Hand.  
About Norman playing dress-up, I think it was Max that said,  
“Did he just say ‘I will lick your face!’?”

It was my 11th grade year,  
October, I think,  
My mom yelled to me, “Go take a shower!”  
I thought, “OK, MOTHER! I’ll go take a shower in the middle of Psycho!”

It was just before 12th grade,  
Late June,  
We had a Yard sale.  
I remember it was the Saturday  
Just before, or maybe just after, Michael Jackson passed.  
During the yard sale,  
I wanted to sell some used books,  
But nobody bought them.  
Mom, sis, and I  
Went to a cool 1950’s-style  
McDonald’s  
For lunch,  
Went to Books-A-Million,  
I got two books: Witch Child and Faerie Lord,  
Went to Target,  
Sis got Sims 2 expansion packs.  
We came home,  
I recorded Psycho.  
On Sunday,  
At Katherine’s house,  
We watched the movie  
In her basement.  
Her dad tried to sneak up on us,  
But he tripped  
On a cooler.  
I thought two things:  
“Mr. Chacey will be showing this  
Next year when Katherine’s brother  
Is in his class. Thomas is  
Watching with us now. Chacey  
Should pay me! I’m doing his job!”  
And  
“Apparently, Hitchcock was crazy.  
But, then, Mr. Chacey told my class that…  
Chacey’s kinda crazy…”  
I brought blueberry muffins  
Sort of as a joke  
About that one time  
With movies in the basement  
And a birthday muffin.  
I brought Dark Knight Uno,  
And we watched The Dark Knight,  
And a haunted lighthouse show  
On Travel Channel,  
And Ripley’s Believe It or Not,  
And Bridezillas.  
A couple days later, at her pool party,  
I was talking to Zach,  
A fan of both The Dark Knight  
And Psycho,  
When he asked, “Who’s Mrs. Bates?”

It was just before 12th grade,  
July,  
I printed a PDF script  
I’d seen online. That night,  
It was the first time I’d seen  
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince  
In theaters.  
Before Dad and I went that night,  
I played The Phantom of Venice.  
After we came home,  
We watched Ghost Adventures  
At the Ancient Ram Inn  
And we had Arby’s.

It was my freshman year of college,  
Second semester, late February,  
I helped Tarryn  
Change her bed linens,  
And then we watched Psycho  
In Hanover Hall.  
I started my laundry in the basement  
And kept running out  
For dryer breaks,  
And once,  
To get my hat like Arbogast’s.


	2. Psycho II (1983)

January of junior year:  
New TV downstairs  
From the Circuit City  
Going out-of-business sale  
Where the HH Gregg is now.  
Playing Nancy Drew on  
Nintendo DS,  
The Mystery of the  
Clue Bender Society.  
Watching Lord of the Rings  
To test the new TV.  
Flipping through channels  
Upstairs  
In Mother’s room.  
There was a quick glimpse  
Of Bindi the Jungle Girl  
And a future with Flight 29 Down.  
There was a quick glimpse  
Of Psycho II,  
Norman in the  
Attic, trapped,  
Just before going to bed.

June, mid-June, of junior year:  
In TV Productions,  
Two movies I remember:  
Signs and  
The Truman Show.  
We had the first showing  
For those who were exempt  
From  
And finished early  
On finals day  
For that class.  
I remember  
It was a Friday.  
I remember  
Being on Facebook  
For a while  
That afternoon.  
Before going to sleep,  
I was reading  
Harry Potter and the  
Deathly Hallows.  
I played GameCube  
For a while  
In Spare Oom:  
The Lion, the Witch, and  
The Wardrobe.  
I tried to imagine  
The Battle of Hogwarts,  
Before the movie,  
But couldn’t.  
I don’t really remember  
What happened  
That Saturday.  
Sunday night,  
Late,  
And into Monday morning,  
Early,  
I stayed up  
Really late  
Since I had no finals  
The next day,  
Monday.  
Sunday,  
9 PM,  
MythBusters.  
10:30 PM,  
America’s Funniest Home Videos.  
11 PM,  
I rediscovered  
Whose Line Is It Anyway?  
Monday morning,  
Early Monday morning,  
Midnight, a stroke of luck,  
Psycho II  
Was on a cable movie  
Channel.  
After the flashback,  
I realized,  
“OMG! It’s  
In color!”  
I would’ve screamed  
Out loud  
At the eye in the  
Peephole, but  
It was 1 AM.  
Then,  
2 AM, a  
Law and Order: Criminal Intent  
“Masquerade” with  
Liza Minnelli.  
3 AM,  
I fell asleep,  
There in Spare Oom,  
Listening to faint  
Road noise,  
Wondering what life  
Would be like  
Had Tony Perkins  
Lived life with  
No AIDS.  
Had he not died.  
Tuesday,  
I only had one final,  
The second half of a  
Four-hour school day.  
I waited in math  
With my friend Natalie  
As our classmates  
Took the final.  
She was reading  
Angels and Demons.  
I told her,  
“I would’ve brought my  
Dark Knight Uno, but  
I realized I didn’t  
Actually buy it yet.”  
I took my Spanish  
Final in la Señora Myers’  
Class. When we  
All finished,  
We listened to  
Jason Mraz  
Until dismissal,  
Sang along to  
“I’m Yours.”  
Went home  
And realized  
I had a question  
About the chemistry  
Final the next day.  
Went back  
And found  
I didn’t need to  
Take that one,  
Either.  
Mr. Hall said  
He hoped we’d  
Meet in the halls again  
The next year,  
But, sadly, he never came back,  
Since he was ill.  
Came home again  
And watched  
Law and Order: Criminal Intent,  
“The View from Up Here”

Between 11th and 12th grades, July:  
Psycho II  
Was on cable again,  
So I recorded it  
On an old VHS tape.  
As it recorded  
In the middle of the night,  
I hallucinated more than  
Dreamed of  
Being locked away  
Someplace,  
Escaping by pure luck,  
Wandering through fantasy,  
Returning home  
Just to be killed  
In a way shown to  
TV I by crazy old  
Mr. Chacey.  
A few nights later,  
It was a rainy, stormy day,  
Sis was out with friends,  
Dad was doing who knows what,  
I convinced mom  
To go out to Red Lobster for dinner  
In the rain.  
I remember having  
A regular shrimp platter  
And New England clam chowder.  
The two of us  
Came home and  
Watched Psycho II  
And had ice cream  
Sandwiches.

About two-and-a-half years later  
I was finally able to  
See the movie again  
On TV.  
The VCR quit playing  
The VHS tape I had  
And I didn’t have the  
DVD yet.  
It was that night that I realized  
Why I love  
These movies.

February 2016,  
Valentine’s Day Weekend,  
Katherine and I finally got around  
To watching all three sequels  
At her house.  
There were loads of dumb jokes  
About how the victims were idiots  
And how they kept repeating popular quotes,  
And Katherine kept making boob jokes.  
We were in the living room this time,  
And Katherine’s parents had been divorced a while  
At that point,  
So nobody came to sneak up and scare us like with  
The first movie.  
We had blueberry muffins  
Like when I went over  
To watch the first movie with her.  
During the second one,  
I kinda was hoping  
Katherine would notice that  
Emma Spool looked a lot  
Like her grandma,  
Who was living with her family  
At the time.  
She never did.  
Oh, well.  
And then we got to talking  
About the crappy remake.  
And I got to wondering  
When and if we’d ever watch it.

I couldn’t help but notice  
That on Katherine’s family’s TV,  
The videos were so much clearer  
And prettier  
Than on my little DVD player  
And on the TV in the spare room  
At home.  
I mean, it felt like  
Watching the Hobbit movie  
In theaters that one time  
With high frame rate.  
It was really clear picture.


	3. Psycho III (1986)

The middle of June  
After junior year  
Of high school,  
About a week after  
I saw the second movie,  
Psycho III was on TV.  
Late Friday night,  
Early Saturday morning,  
I recorded it.  
Later that Saturday morning,  
Mother and I went out,  
Got McDonald’s for breakfast,  
Got gas in the car,  
(Both places have been torn down,  
But the McDonald’s was only remodeled;  
The gas station: out of business)  
Went to yard sales  
To check prices  
To compare for our own  
A few weeks later.  
The whole time,  
It looked like rain.  
We got home,  
The clouds looked like night,  
As I watched the movie,  
It began to rain.  
The music by Burwell,  
I decided,  
Is my favorite film score,  
Especially  
“Maureen in the Desert.”  
I couldn’t help but wonder  
What’d happen if  
Maureen hadn’t died  
So tragically.  
I thought to myself,  
As Duke taunted Norman  
With the corpse of “Mother,”  
“No, stupid man!  
That’s not Mrs. Bates!!  
That’s Emma Spool!”

The middle of September  
Senior year,  
I discovered that  
In one of my  
Favorite movies  
In elementary school,  
Gold Diggers:  
The Secret of  
Bear Mountain,  
Was Diana Scarwid,  
Maureen.

November of senior year,  
I told Katherine, my friend  
That happens to be Catholic,  
About Maureen.  
She thought,  
“A suicidal nun?  
That seems like an  
Oxymoron.”  
In TV 3,  
I started to plan,  
Write and film  
The 2012 Apocalypse.  
In the planning,  
I knew I wanted to  
Use my favorite song,  
My favorite scene,  
As inspiration.

February of Senior year,  
After several snow delays,  
I finished the final shots.  
They formed the beginning  
Of the middle:  
The Calendar Keeper’s journey,  
Based on Maureen’s journey.  
I wasn’t planning  
The costume change,  
But it worked  
In my favor  
To be based more  
Off of Mr. Perkins’ vision.

Two-and-a-half years after  
Seeing it the first time,  
It was on TV again.  
I watched it  
In the middle of the night.  
I laughed at Duane Duke’s  
Awkward lamp dance.  
And I had random  
Ice cream cravings  
At 2 AM.

One night,  
Nearly two years since  
Seeing it on TV last,  
I was flipping to the  
Eleven-o-clock news,  
And it was on  
The NBC Cosi  
Retro channel.  
The movie was about,  
Maybe halfway done?  
Three-quarters of the way done?  
Anyway,  
Maureen was  
Talking to Father Brian  
About being saved  
In the shower,  
So maybe it was only twenty-five  
Minutes in.  
I watched a few minutes,  
But then switched to the  
News after all.  
I love these movies,  
But even ones I love,  
I hate watching  
When someone’s already started.  
And that’s why I have  
The DVD:  
Because I never see it  
On TV much, not anymore.


	4. Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990)

A couple weeks after seeing  
Part three,  
Sometime in July,  
Just before senior year,  
Psycho IV was on  
One of the cable channels.  
Just before it came on,  
The Little Vampire  
Was on another channel.  
When Rudolph said his  
Father wasn’t a monster,  
I was reminded of Norman  
Saying his mother  
Wasn’t a monster.

While I watched it,  
I recorded it.  
But when I missed a  
Few details and  
Tried to rewind it,  
The recording stopped.

In watching it,  
I noticed a few things:  
“What does ‘inordinately’  
Mean? Why does Norman  
Keep using that word?”  
And:  
Closer to the end,  
“Ew! Norman! Your mom’s  
Getting her toxic puke  
All over you!”

It was a Friday night  
When I first saw it.  
Afterwards,  
Ghost Adventures was  
On TV.  
During commercials,  
I checked the  
TV Guide  
And recorded  
Psycho IV again  
On Thursday  
The next week.

About ¾ of the way  
Through senior year,  
In English class,  
We were going over  
Vocabulary words.  
I thought,  
“Livid… sounds a bit  
Like lurid… I still  
Don’t know what that  
Means from Psycho IV…  
How much do you wanna  
Bet it’s the next  
Vocab word? Hey!  
It’s the next  
Vocab word!”

Three years after  
Seeing it on TV,  
I got the Psycho  
Sequel triple feature  
DVD set, the  
Only way I’d  
Have my own  
Copy of part 4 after  
The VCR died.  
In that three years,  
It had never  
Come on TV again.


	5. Psycho (1998 Remake)

Sometime during sophomore year,  
Long after we’d watched the original,  
B-Dunk said she’d seen the  
Remake  
Over the weekend,  
And that it was crap.

Junior year, sometime in  
Mid-April,  
I came home from school  
And it was on one of the  
Cable movie channels,  
Though technically it was  
Mostly over.  
From what I could tell then,  
“Viggo Mortensen? Yay!”  
“Pink?! Mother’s dress isn’t  
Supposed to be  
Pink.  
And what’s with her hair?  
Why’s she surrounded by living  
Birds?  
EW. She’s UGLY!”  
“Wow. That really was awful,  
Like B-Dunk said.”

Late the following August,  
Maybe a week and a half  
Before school started up again,  
We cleaned out some  
Old stuff from Spare Oom  
On a Friday morning,  
And I Facebook-stalked  
One of my old friends  
From first grade,  
And played “Country Story.”  
After cleaning stuff up,  
Mother and I went to  
Target  
For some storage tubs to  
Put in there.  
We went to the Burger King  
Outside the mall  
For lunch.  
And then we went to the  
Used book store  
A couple blocks away,  
Over near the Staples office store.  
I got  
The Name of This Book Is  
Secret  
And the first  
Septimus Heap book.  
That night, sis and I  
Watched Ghost Adventures again,  
And I let her borrow  
Septimus Heap  
While I read the other book.  
As sis went to bed,  
I stayed up  
Through early Saturday  
Morning.  
As I watched the  
Whole remake, I  
Recorded it.  
I thought it ironic  
That Norman spying  
Through the peephole  
Ended up being raunchier  
On his part,  
Since there were several  
Ads for male enhancement  
Products  
During the commercials.  
I laughed, because  
One of the  
Satisfied customers  
Looked like  
Mr. Chacey.

In the time since  
The VCR stopped working,  
I’ve wanted to get  
The DVD of  
The remake,  
Since it’s one of those movies  
I love to hate.


	6. Bates Motel (2013 TV Series)

Sometime in early 2012.  
I found out  
There was going to be a new prequel TV show,  
Bates Motel.  
I wondered if it would make me  
More or less confused  
About Norman’s past  
After the fourth movie.  
I hoped it would be interesting.

As I started hearing more about it,  
I was happy to hear  
The cast includes  
Freddie Highmore and  
Max Thieriot.  
But as I started hearing more about it,  
I slowly began dreading  
The 2013 release.  
I mean,  
Since when does  
Norman have  
A brother?  
Why the fuck would you set  
A Psycho prequel in modern day?  
Why the fuck would you  
Have that lead to so many  
Changes?


End file.
